Joining the Top 25 for the first time in four years, finishing finals and looking ahead to the holidays made this a busy and distracting week for the Colorado women's basketball team.

Fortunately, they gained their focus in time to rout Utah Valley, 81-45, on Saturday at Coors Events Center.

"There's been a lot of upsets in the last week or so," Buffs head coach Linda Lappe said. "You look at finals, you look at getting ready for a break here, and I think both of those things attribute to those upsets. We wanted to make sure that wasn't us. We wanted to make sure we were ready."

Jen Reese scored a career-high 16 points, Chucky Jeffery nearly got another double-double (12 points, nine rebounds, seven assists) and the 25th-ranked Buffs (10-0) remained undefeated. It is just the fourth 10-0 start in CU history, but the Buffs' second in a row.

While the Buffs avoided the upset bug that has hit other Pac-12 teams -- as well as some others around the country -- this week, it took a little while to get going. CU scored the first seven points of the game, but led the Wolverines (4-10) by just three going into the final nine minutes of the first half.

"I feel like going into it we were ready to go, but I feel we were a little frantic in the beginning," said Reese, who added four rebounds. "We just had to settle down a little bit and I feel like we did that after a while and things worked out better from there."

CU went nearly four minutes without a field goal, but hit a handful of free throws to increase its lead to 19-11. Arielle Roberson broke the field goal drought with 5:54 to go in the half and CU cruised into the break.

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Colorado closed the half on a 12-0 run and outscored the Wolverines 23-3 over the final 8:03 of the half.

"They were switching (defenses) and we kind of worked on some of that stuff, but then they went to zone and they were throwing a couple different things at us," Jeffery said of CU's early struggles. "We just had to find the open spots. Once we got that underway, we got a couple of steals and ran in transition a little bit, I think we got into our rhythm and that's when we started getting it together a little bit."

Brittany Wilson added 11 points and a season-high seven rebounds and Roberson 10 points for the Buffaloes. Rachel Hargis had another nice game, too, with nine points and seven boards, helping CU to increase its lead to as much as 38 points in the second half.

Defensively, Lappe had little to complain about. The Buffs held the Wolverines to a season-low point total. Utah Valley's starting five played the first half without hitting a single field goal. All three points from the Wolverines' starters in the first half came on Kaycee Mansfield free throws.

"Other than putting them at the free throw line a few too many times, I thought our defense was very solid," Lappe said.

Lappe said she was pleased with the overall effort and result, especially considering all the outside distractions. Jeffery was relieved to get through it, too.

"Everybody is trying not to think about break and by thinking about that, we are still thinking about it," she said. "We have little distractions here and there, but we were able to pull through and that's a good thing."

Undefeated going into the holiday break for the second year in a row, Lappe couldn't be much happier with the Buffs.

"I'm excited to know where we are at this point in the season," she said. "It's good to go into a little bit of a break here without a loss and playing pretty well."

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@BrianHowell33.

Fast break

What went right

An exceptional final 8 minutes of the first half -- when CU outscored Utah Valley 23-3 -- gave the Buffs all the breathing room they needed to roll to the win.

What went wrong

Before those 8 minutes, CU didn't play like the 25th-ranked team in the country. CU was sloppy and lacked energy during first 12 minutes

Star of the game

Jen Reese. She made the absolute most of her 18 minutes, scoring a career-high 16 points and pulling down four rebounds.

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